I never did find either Gerda or the car. I had just about given up, sitting on the rim of one of the fountains and wondering what the bus fare to Pompeii would be when I heard the shrill peep-peep of the three-wheeler’s horn. When I looked up there she was. Barreling at seventy or eighty kilometers an hour down that gravel path that wasn’t meant for any sort of car, not even a three-wheeler. Looking really mad, too. I wanted to say something about how strange it was to see her driving herself, but she was demanding to know where the hell I’d got to, because she’d been just about out of her mind looking for me.
It all worked out all right. The nice thing about a lovers’ misunderstanding is that you can have such a good time making up when it’s over.
Anyway, that had been the first time Gerda demanded we go to see the Caserta palace. I hadn’t thought there would ever be a second, but there was.
I don’t think I said what made the Naples–Caserta road stinky. It was patches of farmland, but what the Italians grew on those farms wasn’t food. It was flax. The way you raised a crop of flax was to grow it and then, when it was ripe, you just left it in the field to rot. When it was good and rotten you could pull the flax fibers right out of the decaying greenery they had grown up in.
By the second time we made that trip the rotting had gone full compass. The stink was a little hard to describe, not anywhere near super-skatole strength but plenty unpleasant. You might say it was like your neighbor’s garbage when he hasn’t paid his sanitation bill and it’s been decaying in the sun for a week or two. After about twenty minutes’ exposure I expressed my feelings to Gerda. It only took one syllable: “Phew!”
She gave me a look that started out annoyed but ended apologetic. “Oh, hell, hon, I thought the harvest would be all over by now.”
I was big about it. “Not to worry. We’ve only got a couple of kilometers to go.”
She gave me a fond smile and blew me an air kiss. “I’ll make it up to you,” she promised. Then she rested one hand on my lap, by which I mean on the part of my lap where it could do the most good. So things were going well, except then we hit a particularly thick stretch of stink and Gerda took that hand away to hold her nose.
“Jesus,” she said. And then, “Oh, something you mightn’t know. Ever have grappa?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s what drives the Italian government guys crazy. The farmers distill it out of homemade rotgut wine, and they don’t pay taxes. And they put their stills in places like these, because with all that decay stink nobody can smell their stills. I bet you could go into any of those farmhouses and pick up a bottle of white lightning.” Then she caught sight of a roadside sign—it said “Caserta 1.5 km”—and forgot about the smelly flax. “Almost there, hon,” she informed me. “Let’s hope there’s a parking space we can find again.”
Well, there was. Lots of spaces, right up by the main entrance. But we couldn’t use any of them. Big signs warned that the best of them were for doctors and other medical personnel only, and for the second-best spots the signs said they were reserved for the families of patients in the medical center only. Because the king’s palace wasn’t a tourist spot anymore. When we weren’t looking the palace had been requisitioned to become an emergency clinic for victims of the necrotizing illness people were calling Pompeii Flu, and ordinary civilians were no longer allowed entrance.
Never mind what Gerda said then—or, for that matter, what I said myself. It was mostly profanity anyway, except for the part where she said, “Move over, Brad.” And, when I gave her an uncomprehending look, “Didn’t you hear me? I’ll drive.”
The best way to deal with Gerda was not to argue but just to do as she said. I let her turn around and head for home without argument. I was patting her thigh as she jockeyed the three-wheeler through the gate to the highway, trying to console her for the loss of her excursion.
It turned out she didn’t need much consoling, though. A couple of minutes after we were back on the road the grim look on her face abruptly lightened. “Hon,” she said, “you know what? Remember what I said about the farmers bootlegging grappa? Well, I bet right there is one place where they do! Let’s take a look at—that one. The one that looks the most like a plain old Italian flax farmer going broke because the Ethiopians can grow it for half his costs.”
She didn’t have to tell me which farmhouse she meant by “that one.” She screeched the three-wheeler in a left turn to the underpass and up a driveway to a two-story house in serious need of fresh whitewash. I waited in the car. She was gone no more than a couple of minutes, and when she came out she patted her backpack, grinning. “Told you,” she said. “Now let’s go home.”
So we did, me driving again and the trip made to seem a lot shorter by virtue of passing the grappa back and forth. It was vile stuff, all right, sort of what I imagined drinking cleaning fluid would be if it were mixed with lye. But it made us happy. Happy enough so that before we got on the Pompeii autostrada Gerda unwrapped a fresh pack of chewing gum and handed me a stick. “In case the polizia stop us,” she said. “So we won’t smell quite so drunk.”
I laughed out loud. “You have to get over that morbid fear of police,” I told her, having teased her once or twice about her being such an obsessively law-abiding driver.
She gave me a mild frown. “You wouldn’t take that attitude if you if you knew why I had it,” she said.
“Ah, but I do. You told me last time I said something about it,” I began, because she had. The local carabinieri were famous for stopping pretty women driving alone.
But I stopped in the middle of the sentence, as she reached over and good-naturely patted my leg. “We don’t want anything keeping us from getting right home, do we? Because I haven’t forgotten what I promised.”
Well, neither had I.
What Gerda had promised was that she would make that trip up to me. She did, too. Very fully and enjoyably. Enough so that I would have done the whole thing over the next day, for the same reward.
There was one other thing about Gerda that seemed to have changed. That was her sudden appetite for news.
That was a surprise—Gerda hadn’t seemed to take very much interest in what the world outside of Pompeii was up to—but it wasn’t altogether a bad thing. Staying home in front of the event channels was a lot cheaper than hitting the casinos on Ischia or the Neapolitan bar scene. I was even able to send enough money to Staten Island, my mother wrote me, to let her go shopping for some new clothes.
I didn’t share Gerda’s interest in world events at least until the evening when I went out to get some more wine and, when I came back, there was something other than the inevitable Pompeii Flu stories. There were about a million rioters raising hell on the screen, I didn’t immediately find out where, beating up on a couple thousand badly outnumbered cops, I never knew why. I thought at first that I might be seeing a reprise of New York City and the Inguishi, but it turned out to be Bulgaria, and the issue was something about local politics. The scenario wasn’t all that different, though. The police ultralights were painted a different color, but they were right up there to make the rioters want to go home. They did a good job of it. The Bulgarian cops weren’t bothering with the old infrareds. What they were firing into the mob was PEPs—pulsed energy projectiles. Those hurt more than anything else most police departments possessed, and the screaming that came out of the rioters as they hit you wouldn’t believe.
Actually the world seemed to be returning to normal.
Then there was the day I stopped by my room to pick up some clean clothes. I had finished picking out the clean socks and underwear I had come for, when it occurred to me to look in the fridge.
Maury’s sausages were gone.
A few crumbs of repellent-looking meat—or something—on the back of the shelf was all that was left of them. Well, the crumbs plus that unforgettable smell. Nothing more.
So I called Maury at his office right away. When he answered his expression was abstracted. “Oh, it’s y
ou,” he said. “What do you want?”
His unfriendliness had been elevated a notch or two. I chose to overlook it. “It’s Jiri,” I told him. “He died yesterday. His widow just came by to pick up his stuff.”
Maury looked mildly interested. “What did he die of?”
“She didn’t know. But, listen, I checked the refrigerator and your wursts are gone.”
“Oh,” he said, looking not at all as stricken as I would have guessed he would be, “right.” He was actually giving me an embarrassed grin. “I should’ve told you. I didn’t like them being left alone, and anyway I’ve got my own rooms to myself now. Didn’t I tell you? My roomie quit and went home. Said he didn’t like Pompeii’s climate. So day before yesterday I came by and picked the wursts up. Sorry if it worried you. I have to get back to work.” And his picture shivered and was gone.
So one question was answered. It did, however, leave me with another.
Neither Jiri nor I had been present in the room when Maury said he’d been there, so how did he get in?
10
REMEMBERING UNCLE DEVIOUS AGAIN
When I say those weeks were great I don’t mean there weren’t any little worries here and there. In fact there was one quite large one, because I never quite relaxed. I did not forget that Gerda had left me before. Three times before, if you counted that first time right after we’d met. And I had no guarantee that she wouldn’t do it again.
Apart from such grim thoughts, though, the days were great. It wasn’t just the parts of them that we spent in bed, either, although those were untiringly fine. It was something else that made that time so happy I was consciously aware of how much happiness I was being blessed with, something that I’d never had before.
I think the right word for that condition is “friendship.” In addition, I mean, to love. What that amounted to was getting to know each other, Gerda and me, in ways I had never known another person. Like, for instance, there was the night when Gerda had put out some wine and fruit and cheeses, which we had formed the habit of eating instead of a real meal so we could get to bed sooner. While we were eating I told her about Jiri’s widow and Maury’s grouchiness.
She didn’t seem particularly interested in either. So later, after we made love, I must’ve drowsed off. When I woke up Gerda was sitting cross-legged on her couch, next to her shelves of tiny porcelain dolls and fanciful seashells and all the other little bits and pieces of what did you call them, bibelots or tchotchkes or maybe just junk, that she liked to have around her. I supposed she’d just come out of the shower, because her hair was wet. She was wearing a terrycloth robe and talking into her opticle. When she saw me looking at her she killed the connection and came over to give me a wakeup kiss. “Have a nice nap?” she asked.
I nodded, but what I said was, “Who were you talking to?”
“Just Jeremy Jones,” she said. “To tell him I’d be a little late this morning. There’s coffee.” There was, too. American-style coffee, too. Definitely not the concentrated sludge that Mediterranean people preferred. When she brought the cups over and sat down next to me I was surprised to observe that her jaws were moving rhythmically.
“You shouldn’t chew so much gum,” I remarked. “Bad for your teeth.” It wasn’t meant as a criticism, just a comment, but she seemed to take it seriously.
“I brought it back from Russia. I think they get it from the Stans, but don’t tell anybody. Look.” She opened a drawer in the end table and pulled out what looked like a box of fancy, foil-wrapped chocolates. It wasn’t, though. It was a selection of maybe half a dozen flavors of chewing gum, each in a wrapper colored to match its taste. “The strawberry’s my favorite,” she told me, “but the lime’s good, too. And the cherry.”
I accepted one of the bright red cherry-flavored ones, and her praise had been justified. It didn’t taste like the kind of cough medicine my mother had forced on me when I was six. It tasted precisely like sweet fresh cherries, picked right off the tree, with the morning dew still on them. Not that I’d ever had any like that to remember so it was like I’d imagined from all those TV cooking shows and commercials. “So did I lie?” Gerda asked. When I admitted she hadn’t, she said, “Oh, by the way. Nonno’s—my uncle’s—caretaker at the dacha—his name’s Vassili something—said he remembered your Uncle DeVries.”
That wasn’t the most pleasing sentence I’d ever heard from her. “Did Uncle DeVries swindle him, too?” I asked cautiously.
“Well, yes,” she conceded. “Not Nonno personally, but he pretty much cleaned out Nonno’s brother. Nonno almost lost the dacha.”
There was one particular thing I had got used to saying most of the, happily infrequent, times when Uncle Devious’s name came up. I said it again. “I’m sorry.”
She patted my hand. “It isn’t your fault, Brad. Were you fond of your uncle?”
Well, in a way I had been, I admitted to her. As had almost everybody else Uncle Devious met. People liked him. That was the secret of his success as a confidence man. My mother wasn’t the only one who had handed over substantial sums for his Goro Lama’s Mercy Fund for Needy Tibetan Children. “It wasn’t just the Goro Lama’s name he used, either,” I told her. “He had a scroll that he told everybody had been calligraphed by Sonam Gyatso himself. Know who Sonam Gyatso was? The Dalai Lama, that’s who. I don’t mean the current one, whoever he is. I mean the one centuries ago who went out among Genghis Khan’s Mongols and converted them to Buddhism. Uncle Devious used to give copies of that scroll to high-end contributors, like my mom.”
Gerda was wearing a doubtful look. “He must have had more going for him than just a nice personality?”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “He had all the props, too.” And I told her about his fancy office in downtown KC, with his primitive 2055-style virts of hungry but scrubbed and neatly dressed Tibetan children, in the schools his fund (he said) had provided for them. And his fifteen or twenty devoutly dedicated employees, handling the bookkeeping, liaising with the other funds Uncle Devious sat on the boards of, and sending out the thank-you scrolls to the mom-and-pop contributors too small for Uncle D to give his personal attention to. And especially his head employee, Merrilee Bournemouth, the knockout.
Gerda gave me a confident little grin. “Prettier than me, Brad?”
I gave her the right answer. “Of course not. But to a kid, she was plenty pretty enough. I would have given my right arm to kiss her just one time.”
She gave me an acknowledging smile. “One thing I’m not so clear about. He wasn’t your real uncle?”
“Well, technically, sure, he was real enough. He married my mother’s sister, the old maid. The sick old maid, with the type-four leukemia that they couldn’t do much about and the hard-core somadone habit. She had just three years of being Mrs. Rev. Delmore DeVries Maddingsley, and then she died. Leaving him everything she owned. Which he said he would never accept a penny of, so he donated the whole thing to the Goro Lama Fund. Which, of course,” I said, “was really himself anyway, wasn’t it? But nobody knew that at the time.”
All this time Gerda was holding my hand and letting me just talk. Which I found easy, and kind of comforting, to do. It took my mind right off Jiri’s death and Maury’s bad mood, and all the other recent annoyances.
It had been a long time since I’d really talked to anybody about my Uncle Devious in a comfortable, that is to say noninterrogatory, way. So I told her everything I could remember, winding up with the day my uncle’s head auditor from the fund office called, sounding pretty well terrified, to tell us that Uncle Devious hadn’t come in that morning and none of the servants at his duplex on Heinlein Street had seen him since the previous afternoon, and did we have any idea?
We didn’t. The next day the police showed up. And then the FBI. And then every law enforcement agency you could think of, from Security and Interpol on down. By then we had a pretty clear idea that Uncle Devious was actually a despicable swindler of widows and orphans. And of anybody
else trusting enough to believe in his foundation for Tibetan kids.
Gerda shook her head commiseratingly, but she didn’t say anything. What she did was get up and fetch a couple of glasses, along with a bottle of Maury’s wine. “Here’s to better times,” she said, and I drank to it with goodwill. She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “He wasn’t just an ordinary embezzler, though, was he?”
I drained my glass. Then I gave her the truthful answer. I told her about the day when Merrilee Bournemouth had come to our house. She didn’t look like a video star then. She looked haggard, and she was begging for every clue we could give her that might help her figure out Uncle Devious’s whereabouts.
Mom didn’t want to tell the woman a thing. She suspected that Uncle D had been banging Merrilee all along—certainly since her sister’s death, and most probably for quite a while before it. (He had, too.) But Dad hadn’t been that suspicious, I guess. He told Merrilee all he knew, which was essentially everything we’d told the various law enforcers and not much help to anybody. And then a few days later the cops began to ask us if we knew where Merrilee Bournemouth had taken herself to.
We didn’t know the answer to that. Neither did they. Not then. Not until later that year when the plan to blow up Inner Mongolia’s city of Hohhot got ratted out by the ticked-off girlfriend of one of the terrorist explosive experts. In the subsequent ruckus they said Uncle D was killed and Merrilee got paralyzed by a couple of fletches in her lower spine, and the whole thing came out. What that whole thing had financed was three or four years of arsons and assassinations in Inner Mongolia and Outer, along with parts of Siberia and several of the neighboring Stans. And all the money that financed those goings-on had come right out of the very deep pockets of my charitable uncle.
“From the Tibetan orphans’ fund,” Gerda guessed.
All the Lives He Led-A Novel Page 14